December 9, 2017

And a Bad Way to Interview

I'm seriously considering Full Time Employment mainly because one of my clients wants
to convert me to FTE and I love working with the client. But, I want to understand
what opportunities are available. So, I've been doing a fair bit of interviewing.

Most of the interviews have at least some component of "whiteboard coding."
"Whiteboard coding" is where the interviewer presents a problem and asks the
interviewee to write code that solves the problem or implements to algorithm
on a whiteboard.

Let's step back and look at the purpose of and constraints around interviewing.

June 21, 2017

It's just not good enough

I've been buying and trying to use a number of Windows 10 machines.
In the past year, I've bought a Yoga 910, ThinkPad T460p, and a Surface Pro 4 i7. I can't live with any of these machines like I live with
my iPad or my Mac.

It's mostly the little things.

Wireless

The Windows machines just seem to lose their wireless device.
Once every week or two, I'll open the machine and the machine
won't be able to find its wireless device. I have to reboot
the device. I live in my apps (browser tabs, LastPass,
IntelliJ, etc.) for long periods of time. If I have to reboot,
I have to re-enter passwords, recreate REPL sessions, etc. It's
a real productivity killer.

Power

March 19, 2017

AgileBits is not a trustworthy company

I have been an AgileBits/1Password customer for 4+ years. I support
small companies that have laser focus and excellence... which is
what AgileBits seemed to be.

However, I've had a lurking concern that a proprietary software
company secures my most guarded secrets with closed source software.
Recently, AgileBits has demonstrated that they are not a trustworthy
company.

I will tell you the story. I am also moving off 1Password and recommend
that if you're a 1Password user that you seriously consider moving
to another password manager.

December 13, 2016

Long History of Crap for UI

Mesa

NeXT had an enterprise license and
used Mesa for most of its spreadsheet needs.

And I'd get periodic complaints from Steve Jobs about how horrid the UI
was. Rumor had it that he insisted that people export Mesa spreadsheets
to 1-2-3 format, so Steve could look at the spreadsheets in
Improv.

I didn't care. I was a very self-assured 20-something and Mesa
was fast and powerful... it powered automated trading systems and
processed billions of dollars of buy/sell orders every day.

Lift

December 9, 2016

It's alive

Serverless for your cluster. If you're running Mesos or Kubernetes
or Docker Swarm, you can get all the development simplification and
autoscaling of Serverless, without getting locked into a particular
cloud vendor.

Note the props field is a set of properties sent to the Runner and available
to your function at runtime. The props field may also include
descriptors such as JDBC information and access to other network
resources. Because this is sent at deployment time, network resources
(databases, caches, etc.) can be configured at enable-time.

Trying out the code

Based on the Frontend at message from the Tron, you can test your new function.
for example:

See the GIT:b1d92b7430fcc6ed05c38c22d57d2163f6e8bb88 part? That's the git sha of the code
that ran the function. This means for every log line, you can determine the
exact version of the code that was running.

See the REQ:db9d00abf61d9c67f4f0e755e96b8d0e part? This is a unique id of the request.
It is shared across the Funcatron network so that you'll be able to trace and time
requests and fan-outs related to requests across your Funcatron cluster.

Yay!

November 20, 2016

Simple as changing your DNS

I have a side project... a CMS system I rolled myself
called Telegram. It's a simple
way to write some stuff in Markdown or HTML, push
it to GitHub, and it will automatically become
a web site. Telegram hosts Lift's site
this blog and lots of other sites.

As of today, Telegram supports SSL for every hosted site.
Telegram will continue to work as normal if you point the DNS of
your web site to 23.23.179.154 or CNAME to cname.telegr.am.
Your site will continue to be served via HTTP.

November 7, 2016

Put on your Linux Wading Boots

Last week, I took delivery of a Dell Precision 5510
"pre-loaded" with Linux. It did not work so well.

The folks at Dell worked to provide support, but at the end
of the day, the version of Ubuntu shipped with the Precision
was too fragile and the standard Ubuntu installer couldn't
create a boot loader.

However, the Precision 5510 is very nice hardware and
I have a significant need for a laptop with more than 16GB of RAM.

I've also using Linux since 1996 and Linux on laptops since 2000.
What I needed was a mind-set change. I needed to
change my mind-set from "this should work like OS X, Windows,
or Ubuntu on my XPS 13" to "it's possible to do... so go
do it."

August 27, 2016

Not in large scale production

Using it during development means radically less time configuring
my dev machine. Using it during development means I can "install"
different versions of PostgreSQL, Redis, etc. for different projects.

In this way, Docker is very useful.

Not in production

But in production, Docker has a ton of problems.

Each version of the CLI is incompatible with the
last version of the CLI.

I mean, WTF. This means that if I have Docker 1.9 in production someplace,
I have to have a machine with a Docker 1.9 CLI installed in order
to control that machine.

August 6, 2016

Lots of Meals, Some Tasty

I spent a week in Rhode Island on vacation. I grew up here.
When I lived here, there were some pretty good restaurants, but
nothing like the dining scene that Providence currently hosts.
Here's a partial list of the meals we've had and some thoughts on each.

April 30, 2016

It's 2016, WiFi should work

Microsoft announced Bash on Windows.
Basically, it's user-space Ubuntu that proxies kernel-space syscalls
through a proxy... what it means is you get something that executes
Linux binaries on Windows with little or no performance penalty.
Cool.

Given that I'm a sucker for new toys and new stuff, I
went out and bought a Yoga 900 to try
Windows 10, Bash, etc.

The Hardware

The Yoga 900 is quite a nice piece of hardware. Compared to
my 13" MacBook Pro, the Yoga is competitive. It's similar in
size, weight, and feel (solid). Is the Yoga as good as the
MacBook Pro? No. Is it in the same league, yes.

We can use it
for marginal personal gain where we offer something that make's someone
else's life much better but take a substantial portion of the betterment
for ourselves. For example, taking a 30% cut for brokering between
a driver and a passenger may be a passable transaction, but is also
a radical wealth transfer to the broker.